New Constraint on Squark Flavor Mixing from 199Hg Electric Dipole Moment

Abstract

A new constraint is obtained on the CP-violating flavor mixing between the left-handed top scalar quark (\tilde{t}_L) and charm scalar quark (\tilde{c}_L), by considering a chargino loop contribution to chromo-electric dipole moment of strange quark, which is limited by the electric dipole moment of the ^{199}Hg atom. It is found that the flavor mixing should be suppressed to the level of {\cal O}(0.1) for the CP phase of order unity, when \tan \beta is relatively large and sparticle masses lie in a few hundred GeV range. Although it is much stronger than the known constraint from the chargino loop contribution to b \to s \gamma, the moderate constraint we obtain here is argued to leave room for sizable supersymmetric contribution to the CP asymmetry in B_d^0 \to \phi K_s.